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It might, as history has cycles.

But not because it will be replaced with something "better". Democracy just means everybody has a say on decisions affecting them and the society they are in.

If your replacement is closer to "only informed people should have a say", that is even older then democracy, and is much worse in practice.




If we don't replace the current flavour of democracy with something better there won't be much society in a few years (10s, 100s). The next level beyond democracy is tiered, time-limited, and retractable sortism [1]: some kind of a return to roots (Athenian democracy), but with a twist. A quick way to sketch it would look like this:

(i) no functionaries: run all the administrative jobs not in an office by Margaret and John, but in some cluster of computers;

(ii) no political nominations: instead of having elections between Side A vs Side B (vs Side C in non-US countries), all the decision-making positions are up to vote by name and all the candidates are sorted out randomly from the totality of the populace (no candidate can have more than 2 mandates);

(iii) negative vote: all ballots have a special box "No One" invalidating all the candidates (if the majority votes "No One") or reducing the duration of the mandate;

(iv) the duration of the mandate correlated with voter turnout (if 30% of the populace vote, you don't get 100% of the 4-year mandate, you get 1.2 years of mandate);

(v) the vote no longer a fact (you voted for X one time), but a process (you are maintaining your vote for X today also); when a majority of people retract their vote for a certain decision-maker they automatically lose their position of power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition


>If we don't replace the current flavour of democracy with something better there won't be much society in a few years

The current flavour of democracy is already not democratic as practiced in most countries (perhaps Switzerland is an exception).

In the US it's career politicians with little accountability, billionaires and huge coporations with huge influence, paying politicians, media owned by said millionaires or fed BS by the government, a baroque system of chosing President, a failed educational system that doesn't teach kids to be active citizens, fossilized two party system supported by all kinds of powers and structures that the voters aren't allowed to change, and so on. Plus a charade of voting once every five years. If that's democracy, then yes, it should change: to real democracy.

The options you describe would be some of the solutions to that.

Of course those "wise persons in power who know better than us what's good for us" will prevent anything like that.


>fossilized two party system supported by all kinds of powers and structures that the voters aren't allowed to change

The original system wasn't two party. In fact, the first Chief Executive (President of the United States) on leaving Office, specifically warned the populace against anything remotely resembling the formation of political parties.

The populace quickly ignored that advice, and carved up the country between Federalists and Anti-Federalists who either vied to achieve the Supreme Seat of Power to enact their Will, or hold that Seat so no one would be able to avail themselves of it.


I wonder if there's another way. I personally would love to hand the power to informed people. To be clear: I don't consider myself informed. I mean economists deciding about the economy, farmers deciding about the agritulture, programmers deciding about IT, etc. But I have absolutely no idea how that could work in practice. For example, budget is finite and every "interest group" would consider their field of work the most important. This is just not workable.

Our current situation is that (in theory) the elected politicians listen to the general "mood" of the population, and then listen to the experts how to implement the needed changes. I can't think of a better system, we just need to figure out how to make it resistant to abuse.




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